VI.
The Berlin Insurrection.

NOVEMBER 28, 1851.

THE second center of revolutionary action was Berlin, and from
what has been stated in the foregoing papers, it may be guessed that there this
action was far from having that unanimous support of almost all classes by
which it was accompanied in Vienna. In Prussia, the bourgeoisie had been
already involved in actual struggles with the Government; a rupture had been
the result of the "United Diet"; a bourgeois revolution was impending, and that
revolution might have been, in its first outbreak, quite as unanimous as that
of Vienna, had it not been for the Paris Revolution of February. That event
precipitated everything, while at the same time it was carried out under a
banner totally different from that under which the Prussian bourgeoisie was
preparing to defy its Government. The Revolution of February upset, in France,
the very same sort of Government which the Prussian bourgeoisie were going to
set up in their own country. The Revolution of February announced itself as a
revolution of the working classes against the middle classes; it proclaimed the
downfall of middle-class government and the emancipation of the workingman. Now
the Prussian bourgeoisie had, of late, had quite enough of working-class
agitation in their own country. After the first terror of the Silesian riots
had passed away, they had even tried to give this agitation a turn in their own
favor; but they always had retained a salutary horror of revolutionary
Socialism and Communism; and, therefore, when they saw men at the head of the
Government in Paris whom they considered as the most dangerous enemies of
property, order, religion, family, and of the other Penates of the
modern bourgeois, they at once experienced a considerable cooling down of their
own revolutionary ardor. They knew that the moment must be seized, and that,
without the aid of the working masses, they would be defeated; and yet their
courage failed them. Thus they sided with the Government in the first partial
and provincial outbreaks, tried to keep the people quiet in Berlin, who, during
five days, met in crowds before the royal palace to discuss the news and ask
for changes in the Government; and when at last, after the news of the downfall
of Metternich, the King made some slight concessions, the bourgeoisie
considered the Revolution as completed, and went to thank His Majesty for
having fulfilled all the wishes of his people. But then followed the attack of
the military on the crowd, the barricades, the struggle, and the defeat of
royalty. Then everything was changed: the very working classes, which it had
been the tendency of the bourgeoisie to keep in the background, had been pushed
forward, had fought and conquered, and all at once were conscious of their
strength. Restrictions of suffrage, of the liberty of the press, of the right
to sit on juries, of the right of meeting-restrictions that would have been
very agreeable to the bourgeoisie because they would have touched upon such
classes only as were beneath them—now were no longer possible. The danger
of a repetition of the Parisian scenes of "anarchy" was imminent. Before this
danger all former differences disappeared. Against the victorious workingman,
although he had not yet uttered any specific demands for himself, the friends
and the foes of many years united, and the alliance between the bourgeoisie and
the supporters of the over-turned system was concluded upon the very barricades
of Berlin. The necessary concessions, but no more than was unavoidable, were to
be made, a ministry of the opposition leaders of the United Diet was to be
formed, and in return for its services in saving the Crown, it was to have the
support of all the props of the old Government, the feudal aristocracy, the
bureaucracy, the army. These were the conditions upon which Messrs. Camphausen
and Hansemann undertook the formation of a cabinet.

Such was the dread evinced by the new ministers of the aroused masses, that
in their eyes every means was good if it only tended to strengthen the shaken
foundations of authority. They, poor deluded wretches, thought every danger of
a restoration of the old system had passed away; and thus they made use of the
whole of the old State machinery for the purpose of restoring "order." Not a
single bureaucrat or military officer was dismissed; not the slightest change
was made in the old bureaucratic system of administration. These precious
constitutional and responsible ministers even restored to their posts those
functionaries whom the people, in the first heat of revolutionary ardor, had
driven away on account of their former acts of bureaucratic overbearing. There
was nothing altered in Prussia hut the persons of the ministers; even the
ministerial staffs in the different departments were not touched upon, and all
the constitutional place-hunters, who had formed the chorus of the
newly-elevated rulers, and who had expected their share of power and office,
were told to wait until restored stability allowed changes to be operated in
the bureaucratic personnel which now were not without danger.

The King, chap-fallen in the highest degree after the insurrection of the
18th of March, very soon found out that he was quite as necessary to these
"liberal" ministers as they were to him. The throne had been spared by the
insurrection; the throne was the last existing obstacle to "anarchy"; the
liberal middle class and its leaders, now in the ministry, had therefore every
interest to keep on excellent terms with the crown. The King, and the
reactionary camerilla that surrounded him, were not slow in discovering this,
and profited by the circumstance in order to fetter the march of the ministry
even in those petty reforms that were from time to time intended.

The first care of the ministry was to give a sort of legal appearance to the
recent violent changes. The United Diet was convoked in spite of all popular
opposition, in order to vote as the legal and constitutional organ of the
people a new electoral law for the election of an Assembly, which was to agree
with the crown upon a new constitution. The elections were to be indirect, the
mass of voters electing a number of electors, who then were to choose the
representative. In spite of all opposition this system of double elections
passed. The United Diet was then asked for a loan of twenty-five millions of
dollars, opposed by the popular party, but equally agreed to.

These acts of the ministry gave a most rapid development to the popular, or
as it now called itself, the Democratic party. This party, headed by the petty
trading and shopkeeping class, and uniting under its banner, in the beginning
of the revolution, the large majority of the working people, demanded direct
and universal suffrage, the same as established in France, a single legislative
assembly, and full and open recognition of the revolution of the 18th of March,
as the base of the new governmental system. The more moderate faction would be
satisfied with a thus "democratized" monarchy, the more advanced demanded the
ultimate establishment of the republic. Both factions agreed in recognizing the
German National Assembly at Frankfort as the supreme authority of the country,
while the Constitutionalists and Reactionists affected a great horror of the
sovereignty of this body, which they professed to consider as utterly
revolutionary.

The independent movement of the working classes had, by the revolution, been
broken up for a time. The immediate wants and circumstances of the movement
were such as not to allow any of the specific demands of the Proletarian party
to be put in the foreground. In fact, as long as the ground was not cleared for
the independent action of the working men, as long as direct and universal
suffrage was not yet established, as long as the thirty-six larger and smaller
states continued to cut up Germany into numberless morsels, what else could the
Proletarian party do but watch the—for them all-important—movement
of Paris, and struggle in common with the petty shopkeepers for the attainment
of those rights, which would allow them to fight afterwards their own
battle?

There were only three points, then, by which the Proletarian party in its
political action essentially distinguished itself from the petty trading class,
or properly so-called Democratic party; firstly, in judging differently the
French movement, with regard to which the democrats attacked, and the
Proletarian revolutionists defended, the extreme party in Paris; secondly, in
proclaiming the necessity of establishing a German Republic, one and
indivisible, while the very extremest ultras among the democrats only dared to
sigh for a Federative Republic; and thirdly, in showing upon every occasion,
that revolutionary boldness and readiness for action, in which any party headed
by, and composed principally of petty tradesmen, will always be deficient.

The Proletarian, or really Revolutionary party, succeeded only very
gradually in withdrawing the mass of the working people from the influence of
the Democrats, whose tail they formed in the beginning of the Revolution. But
in due time the indecision, weakness, and cowardice of the Democratic leaders
did the rest, and it may now be said to be one of the principal results of the
last years' convulsions, that wherever the working-class is concentrated in
anything like considerable masses, they are entirely freed from that Democratic
influence which led them into an endless series of blunders and misfortunes
during 1848 and 1849. But we had better not anticipate; the events of these two
years will give us plenty of opportunities to show the Democratic gentlemen at
work.

The peasantry in Prussia, the same as in Austria, but with less energy,
feudalism pressing, upon the whole, not quite so hardly upon them here, had
profited by the revolution to free themselves at once from all feudal shackles.
But here, from the reasons stated before, the middle classes at once turned
against them, their oldest, their most indispensable allies; the democrats,
equally frightened with the bourgeoisie, by what was called attacks upon
private property, failed equally to support them; and thus, after three months'
emancipation, after bloody struggles and military executions, particularly in
Silesia, feudalism was restored by the hands of the, until yesterday,
anti-feudal bourgeoisie. There is not a more damning fact to be brought against
them than this. Similar treason against its best allies, against itself, never
was committed by any party in history, and whatever humiliation and
chastisement may be in store for this middle class party, it has deserved by
this one act every morsel of it.